Perhaps I am unfair, as I now realize that is has been nearly four years since I last went windsurfing. That would have been the summer of 2003, the first summer I ever spent in Hood River. To speak of milestones, as of last Tuesday it’s been exactly four years since I first moved to Hood River. In my time since that summer I’ve been dabbling exclusively in kiteboarding, and my windsurfing certainly hasn’t progressed as a result of my monomania.

Luckily I still have my waterstarts down, but they’re pretty weak-sauce at this point. I’m familiar with using the footstraps and harness, but to be honest I get kinda freaked out when I flip into the water, and end up stuck under my sail while still hooked into my lines. Like, most people do these sports because they consider them fun, and I assume that’s why I do them as well, but it seems like I’m still at the point where my sessions are fueled by raw fear more than anything else.

I enjoy a good challenge as much as the next guy, but if these sports don’t start feeling more enjoyable and less life-threatening, suffice it to say we’re going to have words.

Anywho, today I went for a hike in the woods and learned that rural Washington celebrates Memorial Day Weekend with beer, guns and trucks. I was driving down a one-lane logging road outside of Trout Lake and every open space alongside the road had been converted into a makeshift campsite, filled with a truck, a tent from Sam’s Club, and people reclining in folding chairs. One group had a particularly impressive spread located on a beautiful stream, with ten mud-covered trucks and enough coolers to match.

In the end I wound up hiking around the Natural Bridges area, a section of trail where an old lava tube had mostly caved in, leaving behind a number of free-standing bridges. There were some neat cliffs and shallow caves to explore, but I turned around when I realized I was getting closer to the din of gunfire.

Frustrated with trying to get the siphon going again, I eventually gave up and pitched the leftover beer that was in the fermenter. Fortunately there wasn’t a whole lot left, and much of it was sediment anyway. In the end, I only soaked one pants leg with spilled beer.

In a week I’ll get to fire up the fermentation again, and start bottling my beer. It’s no stretch to say that I’ll probably still get at least 36 bottles of beer out of this deal. That’s good, because down at The Sandbar I’m starting to owe a lot of people beer. These days I’m riding without a board leash, which is quite pleasant and very convenient most of the time. Sometimes, however, I’m getting chewed up by gusts and ending up blown 75 feet downwind of my kiteboard, at which point I depend solely on the good graces of other kiters.

I mean, I’m not a total wanker. While kiting today I must have lost and retrieved my board five times or so without assistance. Usually it’s only ten or fifteen feet away, which is a totally manageable distance, but once today I had to spend a couple minutes relaunching my kite… and that’s all it took for my board to make a break for it. Seriously, when kiteboarding is fun, it’s freaking fun. But when kiteboarding is bad, it’s freaking bad. Luckily, I still have have a 100 percent success rate when it comes to not dying in the pursuit of this sport.

As for that kiteboarding mime who’s been hanging around, I think his days are numbered.

I think I’m actually looking forward to the wind picking up, because once it starts blowing stronger with more regularity I’m going to spend more time windsurfing. While it comes with its own unique challenges, windsurfing is a sport that doesn’t frighten me nearly as much as kiting. If the wind is light I’d rather be out kiting than riding on some huge-ass windsurf gear, but if the wind is nuking I’d be much happier tearing it up on a windsurfer than fighting a kite.

Perhaps tomorrow will be the day. Matters are kind of complicated by the fact that I don’t actually have a windsurf board, but it sounds like our rental shop is willing to help me out during these first few weeks. I might need to tweak my sail quiver a tiny bit as well, but it seems like the rest of my rig components are solid.

Kiteboarding. Windsurfing. I can throw punches from both sides of the bar.